It’s good to see St. Paul take a place among elite cities in a philanthropic initiative to help the public sector work smarter.

The focus on government innovation to deliver “better results at a better price” — on behalf of taxpayers who count on local leaders to stretch every dollar — is worthy.

St. Paul was among 13 new “What Works Cities” named last week by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Participation will provide free access to top consultants from around the nation.

The city’s participation “will have a huge impact on our continued work to improve delivery of city services to residents,” Mayor Chris Coleman said in a statement, noting the opportunity to work with experts from Harvard University, the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University.

St. Paul has identified three priorities, including creating a new service-performance management system in four pilot departments — safety and inspections, the library system, public works and financial services. It also will work on improving street reconstruction by adopting a new “results-driven” strategy for contracting and procurement, and standardizing citywide “open data” processes and policies.

The effort will focus on “data-driven innovation,” explains Scott Cordes, the city’s director of budget and innovation.

“We are a very data-rich city, but we don’t turn that into very good information,” he said, to help the city assess current performance, identify areas where it’s doing well and where it can improve.

The point: “to turn that data into information that will allow us to perform better as a city.”

Consulting support for the open-data effort will come from the Sunlight Foundation, which is highly regarded in its field.

Cordes describes a portal that would provide one-stop access to public information on the city budget, inspections, demographic data and more.

But rather than simply placing volumes of information on the city website, the focus would be on doing so in a useful and informative way, Cordes explains, providing context “where it is appropriate to do so.”

The effort will consider the work of other cities — both those “doing it well,” he said, and those that have erred. “We want to avoid those mistakes, where the data is raw and not very useful.”

The Pioneer Press reported that about 40 cities across the country have adopted “open data” policies, including Minneapolis in 2014.

We asked about public input into the policies and process. Cordes said he expects both “internal discussion and external — so whatever we end up with meets the needs of our customers. If we don’t do that, we aren’t going to be successful.”

Data practices advocates and others will be watching the work, in a city with a new policy in 2015 that entails automatic deletion of emails in employee in-boxes after six months, unless the messages are moved to a folder for storage.

Rich Neumeister of St. Paul, a watchdog and activist on data practices, stresses local engagement and told us it will be important to involve organizations and individuals “who have an interest in the data.”

For Don Gemberling, also of St. Paul and a longtime state leader on freedom-of-information and privacy matters, considerations include differences about what information is public and what’s not, as well as the bureaucratic tendency to hold information close. He wonders if the emphasis on putting material online — and the effort, time and money involved — will detract from handing other data requests, including those for older material that’s not posted digitally.

Aaron Twait and Mark Haveman of the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence in a statement cite the problem with a lot of transparency initiatives: “A greater flood on context-less data doesn’t create actionable information.” Instead, the focus should be on making sure the new data are “in a usable, understandable context that allows citizens to interpret information correctly and evaluate government accordingly.”

Real transparency, they say, “helps citizens understand what government does and gives them tools to evaluate” its performance.

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